Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Describe how reliability engineering techniques and methods improve programs, processes, products, systems, and services. - 2009 ASQ CRE BOK
Describe the value that reliability has on achieving company goals and objectives, and how reliability engineering techniques and methods improve program, processes, products, systems, and services. - 2018 ASQ CRE BOK
We see the terms ‘reliable’ and ‘reliability’ in daily advertising, business names and in casual conversations on a regular basis. Reliability has meaning and importance in our society. Product and brand reputations are made or broken by their product reliability performance.
Failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA) is a tool that works to prevent process and product problems before they occur.
I like to define FMEA’s as an organized brainstorm. The process examines a product or process and asks what could go wrong. Then the team systematically determines and rank orders for each failure mode:
– the severity of the problem when it occurs
– the probability of the problem occurring
– the ability to detect the problem before it occurs
Good design engineers think about how the design could fail and improve the design. FMEA provides a structured team approach to further improve the design.
It’s always necessary to estimate the value of specific reliability activities. It is needed to justify the investment required to accomplish the task. Prototypes, diagnostics equipment, and environmental chambers are expensive. The difficulty is an inability to know what will be found, before conducting the experiment.
Not doing the test means the certainty of not finding anything. That is often not enough motivation to invest, to learn something about the reliability performance. The following scenario is just one situation, along with a few ideas to help you estimate the value of investments in reliability work. [Read more…]
Here is an example of how to determine the future value of a specific reliability task. Many of us face the challenge of how to justify spending product development resources to provide insights and information to the rest of the team. Accelerated life testing (ALT) is particularly difficult: It is time consuming, expensive, and at times statistically complex. Having a clear method to estimate the value serves your career and the organization well, as both benefit from the right investments.
It is not enough to have a good mind; it is more important to use it well. — Descartes
Learning and Value
Over the past week, I’ve received a couple of questions about the pursuit of a graduate degree in reliability engineering and about preparing for the CRE. One question was particularly interesting – how will a reliability engineering graduate degree or CRE help my career? [Read more…]
As 12%* of the CRE exam, this is a major section, yet not a very difficult one. There are three basic areas:
If you’ve ever needed to secure funding or samples for a reliability test or had to respond to customer field returns, then you probably already understand the value of reliability.
In some businesses, product reliability is critical to the product’s success. Some businesses strive to be the leading ‘reliable’ producer in the market. [Read more…]